Thursday 28 March 2013 10.33 EDT
First published on Thursday 28 March 2013 10.33 EDT

The weather was bizarre. Everything was said to have turned backward as cold temperatures set in and stayed. The sky was permanently overcast. The lack of sunlight became so severe that harvests failed and food riots broke out. Thousands of people fled Britain to settle in the warmer United States and Switzerland declared a national emergency. The first frost came in August and it was called "the year with no summer".

That was 1816 and the unseasonal summer was later attributed to a volcanic eruption on the other side of the world, but historians may look back on 2013 and declare it the "year without a spring". This March has been the coldest in over 50 years across much of the UK and Europe, and the bitterest ever recorded in places like Sheffield. From Kiev, Moscow and Berlin in the east of Europe to Dublin, Edinburgh and Copenhagen, temperatures for the fourth or fifth week running have barely risen above freezing and an Arctic wind has made it seem even chillier. In Germany they are calling it the "100-year winter". In Bonn, people were said today to be desperate to get out. Meanwhile, you can barely buy a ticket to Egypt, Turkey or the Canary Islands.

If we knew that sometime – anytime – winter would let go and the birds would fly in from the south to build their nests, then perhaps we would all cheer up. But it feels that the natural order of life has been usurped and there is no prospect of warmer days. The medium-term forecast is for more of the same frigid conditions and history tells us the summer will probably be no better. This freezing spring follows the second wettest year ever recorded in England and since 2000 we have barely had a dry summer.

But apart from everyone feeling cold and grumpy for the last 11 months, what cultural, economic and social effects does a missing spring or a string of bad summers produce? Determinists would say that human habits and characteristics are shaped by geographic conditions, and there is plenty of evidence. In 1816, the miserable weather encouraged people to emigrate. In Germany, the shortage of oats to feed horses is said to have spawned ideas that led to the development of the bicycle. In Switzerland, the Shelleys and their chums were kept indoors by the "wet, ungenial summer" and so wrote stories such as Frankenstein. Perhaps we can expect a mass flight from northern Europe, a flowering of the arts from those left, and everyone growing their hair longer to keep warm.

We can certainly expect higher food prices. Just as the "year with no summer" was an agricultural disaster, 2013 is shaping to be one of the worst in northern Europe in decades. The British livestock industry is in crisis with tens of thousands of cattle and sheep having died in the cold. Cereal farmers have not recovered from last year's deluges and winter crops and vegetables lie rotting in sodden, frozen, or snowbound fields.

If the severe weather persists, any seeds already planted are likely not to sprout. Analysts are already predicting the lowest wheat crop in 12 years. Meanwhile, the UN food and agriculture organisation reminds us that food prices have increased 30% since 2000 and can expect to rise at least 30% by 2021.

To make everyone feel worse, economists now expect the severe weather to result in a triple-dip recession. Apart from production being down because people cannot get to work or are depressed with seasonal affective disorder (Sad), the start of the gardening and fashion years are on hold, sports attendances are down and no one is spending. The sad thing is that the weather is behaving just as the climatologists predicted it would as the planet warmed: with extremes of weather.

The government has just one option in the short term. It must do what it did in the 1976 drought when after many weeks of unprecedented heat it appointed Denis Howell to be the minister of drought to co-ordinate a national response. Within three days it started to rain and seemingly never stopped.